A VERY OLD MAN WITH ENORMOUS WINGS
A VERY OLD MAN WITH ENORMOUS WINGS GENRE : MAGICAL REALISM, FICTION GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ FIRST PUBLISHED : 1955 “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” was first published in the pages of the New American Review (1955), much before the majority of his work and twelve years before One Hundred Years of Solitude, probably the most familiar of his stories. What we have here is a children’s story about a place warped by sadness and visited by a distressed, lost Daedalus. Yet its vibrant colour is all its own. It is a story deeply overlapping the febrile plenitude of fiction’s strangeness and the complex relationship we, as humans, have with each other. Like so much of Márquez’s writing the story aches with a luxurious language of sadness and beauty. "He had to go very close to see that it was an old man, a very old man, lying face down in the mud, who, in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldn’t get up, impeded by his enormous wings” We are introduced to a world ...